“The Indian Constitution is a remarkable achievement of anti-colonial thought.” – Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj, while delivering the M.K. Nambyar Annual Lecture 2023

Prof. Sudipta Kaviraj, Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies in Columbia University, and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at NLSIU delivered a thought-provoking M.K. Nambyar Annual Lecture for 2023 on November 17, 2023. The lecture was delivered on the topic ‘Genealogy of the Constitution: On the Originality of Indian Political Thought’. 

The lecture was co-sponsored by the National Law School of India University and the Bangalore International Centre (BIC). 

The session began with the NLSIU Vice Chancellor, Prof. Sudhir Krishnaswamy’s introduction to M.K. Nambyar, and his legacy as a constitutional lawyer. 

“In 1950, in A.K. Gopalan Vs. State of Madras, Meloth Krishnan Nambyar argued that the phrase “procedure established by law’’ in Article 21, should be read not literally but structurally to require a just, fair, and reasonable procedure, prior to preventive detention by the state. He also argued that Articles 19 and 21, should be read together and not separately, in these matters. He lost both matters, lost both arguments in A.K. Gopalan Vs. State of Madras. But over the next three decades the supreme court reversed its decisions, and embraced these arguments. In 1967, in Golaknath Vs. State Of Punjab, M.K. Nambyar argued that the amending power of parliament in Article 368, should be read to include implied limitations to preserve the essential features of the constitution. Once again he lost in Golaknath, only for the court to embrace this position in Kesavananda Bharati Vs. State of Kerala, in 1973. This historical record confirms the place of M.K. Nambyar, among the foremost Indian lawyers in Post-Independence India.”

Selected excerpts from the lecture  

On the Indian Constitution: “It was a remarkable achievement of anti-colonial thought in 1946, when there was not a single decolonized state in the world. The first act of political decolonization from western imperial power in India was also a remarkable act of intellectual insubordination and originality.”

“Indian political thought is actually very innovative if we can do two things – if we can look closely at the ideas that are being presented, and if we learn to separate in a certain sense the language in which the thinking is being done and the content of the thought that is being produced.” He illustrated his views by focusing on (i) Tagore’s notions of religion, science and secularism; (ii) the idea of the “Non-nation state” and on (iii) Ambedkar’s conception of religion and society. 

Among the many interesting features of Prof Kaviraj’s delineation of the Indian thought tradition was the centrality that Tagore attributed to “one of the most significant questions of modernity [viz] If we accept the scientific picture of the world that modern science gives us about the nature of the world, then what happens to our belief in God, what happens to our belief in religion?” Prof. Kaviraj elaborated that Tagore had a very interesting position on this which emerged from his poetry, which was inspired from the Upanishads. It was stated that the main proposition that emerged from the Upanishads is that the basic response of human beings when they encounter nature is wonder.
Prof. Kaviraj said that Tagore saw two kinds of wonder from his reading of the Upanishads – (a) cognitive wonder at the intricacy and complexity of natural phenomena; (b) aesthetic wonder at the beauty and marvel of nature and the universe. These are two distinct forms of wonder, but they are connected. On (i) Prof. Kaviraj said that for a long time, he thought that Tagore agreed with Weber, that since modern science reveals the intricate complexity of the universe and diminishes cognitive wonder, the aesthetic wonder must also diminish. In other words, modernity produces disenchantment, and therefore, in order to re-enchant the world, human beings produce art. 

However, Prof. Kaviraj stated that his position at present has shifted. He argued that in Tagore’s songs, one sees that Tagore was suggesting that if Weber was right, we would never return to nature with the same awe after all its hidden causality is laid bare by science, and yet we continue to do that. 

On the idea of the Non-Nation-State, Prof. Kaviraj noted how there were broadly two different responses to the western nation-state inspired model of political community. One was that under conditions of modernity, the only survivable and effective political formation is a nation state with an identifiable border, people, sovereign, etc. Prof Kaviraj stated that the logic of “blood” is a powerful idea at the foundation of all modern European nation-states structured around this thought. When taken to its logical conclusion, the model suffers from fragmentation and becomes fictional. An alternative to this ‘blood-centred’ notion is a conception of political community grounded in “neighbourliness.” The idea of the neighbour refers to someone who is placed ‘next to me’. Prof Kaviraj said that there are three ways to think about this: “God has placed him next to me, Nature has placed him next to me, or History has placed him next to me”. He further elaborated that whoever we believe to be the agent of neighbourliness, we can take that to be the basis of the political community, as opposed to blood. Prof. Kaviraj stated that, “nextness” is not just spatial; for example, a person in Bangladesh and Florida can share “neighbourliness” because of rising sea levels.

In his comments about Ambedkar on religion and society, Prof Kaviraj noted “two important things” that Ambedkar pointed out, which were – “Religion is needed in a free Society (with a capital S),” and a second striking aspect of Ambedkar’s engagement with Buddhism was that it entailed working with a religious doctrine. A doctrine “which doesn’t have an idea of god, and which does not bother about who created the world for what purpose, etc. So religion is essentially centred on the question – what human beings owe to each other, and that is the only thing that is at the centre of Buddhist religion. It is only in that sense that religion is needed for a free Society.”

With inputs from students Manhar Bansal and Aakanksha Chawla, BA LLB (Hons) programme.